


Life Before Death

by Llamas_Love_Rainbows



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternia-Focused, Culling, F/M, Fantrolls, Troll Culture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-02
Updated: 2013-10-02
Packaged: 2017-12-28 05:34:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/988302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Llamas_Love_Rainbows/pseuds/Llamas_Love_Rainbows
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A troll contemplates their relationships and position within society before they are culled.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Life Before Death

You were going to die. You knew this, had known this, will always know this; such a deeply woven part of the fabric of every trolls mind that no tears or fray's could deny its evidence. No amount of shoosh-paps or feelings jams could rid the inevitable mind field inside every troll's mind that they were, at some point, going to end. Every highblood that boasts their lifespan, their seeming 'immortality' knows that, when push comes to shove, they will die in the same way your people do, they will end just like everything else in this godforsaken universe. They are just as weak, just as vulnerable, and just as susceptible to passing as you are. The end is further from them, perhaps, but just as inevitable, just as undeniable as any other troll to hatch from an egg, any other mortal to take its first steps, to gurgle its first words. As far as you are concerned it just festers longer. It eats further into their consciousness, rots deeper into their think pan and drives them to brutality; drives them to see nothing but their own misfortune; drives them to prove that they are better than you, they are stronger than you, but every troll ends the same way, and you are glad you will never need to know that torture.

You were going to die.

Soon.

Too soon for your liking, though you will admit this to no one but yourself. Not that you didn't know this was going to happen. Not that this wasn't definite anyway. Not that this wasn't engraved into stone from the day you were hatched without the muscles in your legs to keep you standing. You were weak, of no use to the Empire, and why keep those who cannot help that who clothed them, fed them, and educated them through their wigglerhood? How dare you not function properly? How very dare you be of no use? How dare you waste valuable resources which could have been used on healthy, highblood trolls? How dare you attempt to live, when you have not earned it? Do not deserve it? How could you? Why would you? You are a waste. You were hatched a waste and any kindness you have been shown, any act of mercy in your direction was a sin. You should not have kindness. You do not deserve mercy. You are a waste.

And you knew this, to an extent.

You wish you were of use. You wish that you could help the people that have given you more than you could ever give back in return. You wish you could have been the hard-working lowblood that they wanted. You would not question. You would not think. You would work. You would work all night for the Empire that had given you life; slavery, hard-labour, anything that would help the people that to whom you owed it all. You would jump off a cliff, if the Empire told you to, drown yourself in the Alternian seas if the Empress so wished it.

Not that your current situation was far off.

You had to do this, you know. You had to die. You were a waste and they gave you everything and this is all you could give in return. No longer would you take what you did not deserve, no longer would you waste the Empire's efforts.

You were going to die.

She was upset, if you recall, pleaded, if you remember, that things were different.

Nothing was different, nothing had changed.

She knew this.

You knew this.

You both knew this the moment you had started the disjointed morailallegiance you had set up. You knew that you were going to leave her, had to leave her, and that no matter how high her blood is, no matter how deep into the sea she could swim, it didn't matter, this had to be done. She knew you so well that she understood how necessary it was that this happened. Understood that to you, this was your only purpose to living: to die. She knew that and still she stayed. Still she disguised herself and hurried through dirt-ridden slums. Faced the real threat of thieves, of disease, of death just to see you in your squalor and you would tell her the same thing you told her every time she arrived at the doorstep of your hive.

You didn't deserve her kindness.

She would frown, if your memory serves you right. She would frown and mutter how ridiculous you were being, that it didn't matter if you deserved it or not, shouldn't matter.

Did that make you happy? Did that make you sad? You can't remember.

You don't suppose it really matters, not now.

She would spend hours with you. Talking about everything and nothing in carefree motion, hands flying, feet stomping as if every word needed its own action to convey meaning. You would listen, you would comment, you would intently record all her problems, her anxieties, her hopes, her dreams. You would laugh, when appropriate, and you would cry with her when it was needed. She would listen too, sometimes, and you would speak. Not of much, you had little to talk about and, in honesty, you do not believe she was all that interested. She liked to talk about herself, about petty feuds; it was often momentary things that she would forget about the next day. She lived for the moment; her greatest strength and her greatest weakness. She lived only in the present, never dwelling in the past, never waiting for the future. She enjoyed the night that she was living, and lived it.

She was dressed in her finest today, as you glance at her through the sea of wigglers to the minute school of trolls huddled at the other end of the arena. Her dress too heavy to swim in, her make-up so thick, so bold, that only you could catch the tiny features on her you knew so well. Her crooked nose, muted scars, the softness around her waist that would make her look down in discomfort until the newest brand of high-end sweet was released. You never understood it. She was healthy! She was clean! And yet you did not question her, it was not your place to question. She was royalty, she was violet, and she was what every troll should be. And she, of them all, showed you kindness; graced you with their presence. You, the waste of space, the dirt under the Empire's shoes was in diamonds with the most graceful creature on Alternia. No, you would not question her.

She cried today. No, she sobbed. Over silly, unimportant things she would cry: a rust had stole her ring, a purple was prettier than her, but she never sobbed. Perhaps this is just you romanticizing, perhaps you do not mean to her as much as you would like to imagine. But you would like to believe, as selfish and as undeserving as it may be, that it was a sob and not a cry. That it was for you. That, when you are gone, there is someone that will remember that you ever existed. That, when you are gone, someone will grieve for the loss. Whether it was through losing a moirail or through losing a pair of ears it didn't matter. You just want someone to notice you were there in the first place.

You look at her now, through the excited and devastated jumble in front of you. Through the dreams of the future and dreads of the past, you look past them and, for just a moment, your eyes catch. Her eyes violet and swollen, distracted, mascara smudged in an ugly disarray. The trolls beside her with their noses held up, shoulders back in an attempt to look as elegant and as arrogant as possible as she struggles to do the same. She was a sea dweller, a highblood of the finest kind. It was her job, her duty, to look down upon the others. She was to lead the way to the future. She was to see planets and races and galaxies you could not even imagine! She was to live in the lap of luxury! She was to shine with the stars, to meet the people that ruled this side of the Universe and to learn the ropes of the entire Empire! She was to become a general. She was to become a leader*. She was to become whatever she wanted and do so with the elegance and the grace you had come to admire her for.

And you were to die.

And yet, during your last moments together, it was you who offered the comforting smile, it was you who reassured her in the only way you could through the racket, it was you who served her, and it was never to be the other way round. It should never be the other way round.

You were not going to die for the Empire, you decided.

You were going to die for her.

You were not going to waste her space anymore. You were not going to take up her time, take away her dreams by being incompetent, being immobile. Who gives a damn about the Empire? Why should you give a damn about the Empire? The Empire that had sentenced you to death, the Empire that would never allow the two of you to live together as moirails, the Empire that had given you everything just to take it all away.

You were going to die either way, you knew this.

Yet, as you were dragged away from the flurry, from the swollen eyes and the familiar brightly coloured moons towards your end, as the memories of a miserable existence full of poverty, starvation and disgust flutter across your consciousness you remember that you are not dying for them, you are not dying for the villains, the thieves, the dictators that have brought this fate upon you.

You were dying for her, and that was enough.

**Author's Note:**

> *The Condesce does a lot of travelling, so I'm assuming sea dwellers run every day life in the Empire? (On the basis the purple bloods police it...)  
> If you're wondering, I imagine they have a muscle disability in their legs? Not enough for a wheel-chair, but bad enough that they can't stand on their own.


End file.
